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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Book Sorting Funny!

So you all know I've been helping sort books for the Friends of the Library book sale which starts Thursday, in case any of you are in the Charlotte area.

As a former bookseller, and in fact a former shipping & receiving coordinator, I used to sort all the books coming into a B&N superstore for a year, and I also shelved for the year before that. I am very good at sorting books. Not everyone has my knowledge though of books (in fact, that's one of my best assets as I really know many thousands of books off the top of my head.) I wasn't at all surprised to find Eat, Pray, Love and Marley and Me in fiction instead of memoirs, but some of the missorted books really made me laugh, although I could see how they made perfect sense to someone unfamiliar with the book. A few of my favorites:Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl found in Science.(it's a novel)

Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban found in Romance.(it's a history of the American West)

The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George found in History.(it's a novel)

I'm sure there are other books like these that have titles that encourage misshelving. Can you think of others I should be on the lookout for before the sale starts? Have you seen books similarly humorously misshelved? For instance, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano in math/science (it's a novel.)

By the way, I walked over 10,000 steps sorting books for 6 hours. And I wasn't even the primary runner! For the last 3 hours I worked with a friend and mostly I sorted and she took the books to their sections. Excellent workout!

1 comment:

Those are great - especially Pessl's book. I feel like I've seen odd placements of books in library sales, but can't recall them now. I wonder if Sedaris' Squirrel Meets Chipmunk would be accidentally placed in children's book, even though it is absolutely not meant for children.